Brian D. Joseph

Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics

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Research Areas

My main areas of interest can be categorized as follows: historical linguistics, Greek linguistics,
Balkan linguistics, and morphological theory, with secondary areas of interest being
language and ethnicity, Sanskrit linguistics, and Indo-European linguistics in general.

My central scholarly focus throughout my career has been the study of how languages
change through time. I have been guided, moreover, by the belief that the study of language
change is crucial to understanding the nature of human language in general, since languages
are not static, unchanging entities, but rather are continually in flux. Whatever insights have
emerged from my work have come largely through the examination of how one language,
Greek, has developed from prehistoric times (c. 2000 BC) up through the present, thus covering a
span of some 3500 years. At the same time, working on the premise that to be a good historical
linguist, one must be a good linguist, I have tried to contribute to the analysis of the Greek
language at various periods in its development, but especially the Modern Greek stage.

In doing this, inasmuch as a detailed understanding of the workings of a single language
is a good basis from which to understand human language more generally, I have worked
toward the development of a general theory of human linguistic competence that focuses on how
speakers strike a balance between generalizing over limited sets of language data and learning
highly particularized information about individual lexical items, grammatical suffixes and prefixes,
and constructions. Finally, working on the historical development of Greek, a language which
has been in close contact with numerous other languages throughout its history, has led me into
the study of what happens under conditions of intense contact between speakers of different
languages, and specifically the special circumstances that have led to convergences among the
languages of the Balkans in the past millennium.

For all my interest in matters of grammar and change, in recent years, in a sense as an outgrowth of my interest in language contact, I have come to be more and more interested in the social side of language use by members of a speech community. And that, in turn, has led me to consider issues of language sustainability -- what makes a language "work" for its speakers and how the general "ecology" of the language contributes to matters of usage and guides speaker choices and language development in the individual and in the community. Some of my current projects reflect these interests.

Current Projects

My current projects are as follows:

1. a book-length study of the development of the weak pronouns of Modern Greek,
and especially a highly restricted weak nominative pronoun, a development which
has interesting consequences for grammaticalization theory (this has been in the
works for a long time but I hope to have it finished by the end of 2015; it will be
published by Oxford University Press).

2. a sketch of Modern Greek grammar, as part of the LINCOM Europa's Languages of
the World/Materials Series (co-authored with Panayiotis Pappas; this will be
finished in 2015)

3. a book surveying the Balkan languages and the Balkan Sprachbund, co-authored
with Victor Friedman (this will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016).

5. three inter-related projects having to do with language sustainability:

--a study of the Greek of southern Albania, with particular attention to its
dialectological status within Greek on the one hand, and to the factors, on the other hand, that have allowed the language to thrive in the past couple of hundred years (this work is being done jointly with Dr. Christopher Brown of the OSU Dept of Classics)

--a study of the effects of urbanization on Lithuanian, particularly with regard to the lexicon; this is being investigated via psycholinguistic experiments in the field in Lithuania and is part of a broader study of the effects of urbanization on Lithuanian eco-systems, with this notion to be understood in a broad sense (this work is being done jointly with Dr. Mazeika Sullivan of the OSU School of Environment and Natural Resources)

--the Herodotos Project, a project aimed at developing a web-based portal for information about the ethnohistory of the ancient Classical world (this work is being done jointly with Dr. Christopher Brown of the OSU Dept of Classics)